From Chaos to Clarity: Your 12-Step Guide to Building a Strategic Marketing Plan

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Last Updated on November 5, 2025 by Shane Carpenter

A strategic marketing plan is your roadmap, defining a clear path to your goals. When executed, it becomes the engine that drives success. This focus is vital because marketing isn’t selling. It’s the critical process that systematically builds awareness, interest, trust, and affinity, which are  all important and necessary steps before a sale can happen. 

Clients typically come to me for two reasons: they need someone to execute on their behalf or they want to improve their results. In 99% of cases, poor results stem from the lack of a strategic plan. Their efforts are just random tactics, wasting time and money, instead of a structured plan designed to help them meet specific goals. 

A strategic plan changes that equation. In this post, I’ll discuss what a strategic marketing plan is, why you need one, and how to build a basic strategic marketing plan on your own. 

What is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A plan and a strategy are distinct. A plan tells you what you will do, while a strategy tells you how you’ll do it. 

But any strategy has to be tied to goals. 

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you are going on a vacation to Orlando. Your destination, Orlando, is your Goal. How you get there, flying or driving, is the Strategy. Documenting the entire trip is the Plan. 

In essence, a strategic marketing plan tells you where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

Why Have A Strategic Marketing Plan?

Marketing and public relations (PR) are only powerful tools when they are tied to clear goals. Hope isn’t a strategy, and random activity wastes your resources.

Imagine your favorite sports team. When they play, there is a plan in place. They don’t just go out and start playing and hope for the best.

When my niece and nephew were younger, they played soccer, and it was comical. Whoever got the ball first would go as far as they could. There was no passing and no space between them. It was a pack of kids going up and down the field. Any goals that were made were an accident more than anything else.

That’s unstructured marketing.

The plan is the playbook that ensures every activity has a reason and a purpose.  

You started your business reason for a reason. You have things you want to achieve. This in turn informs the marketing that you do.

How To Create a Strategic Marketing Plan

There really isn’t one way to create a strategic marketing plan.

If you talked to 100 marketing agencies and freelancers, you would probably see some similarities, but they would all have their own way on how to plan.

I want to know as much as possible about your business, and it shows in how I like to plan. The more I know about your business, the better the plan will be.

While I have a process I follow, no two plans are ever exactly the same. This is because no two businesses are the same, even if they are in the same industry. 

I have three planning packages and there are differences in the framework of all three. But you don’t need a complex framework to come with a good marketing plan. Here is a simple framework that you can use to build a basic plan for your business:

• Business Goals
• Obstacles
• Target Market
• Differentiators
• SWOT
• Benchmarking
• Marketing Goals
• Marketing Strategy
• Marketing Objectives
• Marketing Tactics
• Measurement
• Scorecard

The framework consists of three parts: Discovery (Steps 1-5), Benchmarking (Step 6), and the marketing action plan (Steps 7-12). 

If you click here, you can download a free template (no email required) you can use to create your strategic marketing communication plan. You can then use this article as your guide to help you create your plan. Ready? Let’s go.

Business Goals

Your marketing and communication should always tie to business goals. I can’t stress this enough. This is why I’m having you go through this exercise. It clarifies what the business is doing and makes it easier for you to later determine what business goals marketing can support. 

There are several items that I feel need to be addressed in this section

The first is to select the future end date for your plan. You can make this date one year from today’s date, or you could tie it to the end of the fiscal year. However, I recommend a third option. Tie it to the end of the calendar year (December 31st ). 

Next, determine what your revenue will be. This figure shouldn’t be random. If you made $5 million last year, it’s not a good idea to say that your revenue for this year will be $20 million.

It might be a nice five or ten-year target but chances are there isn’t going to be that big of a jump in one year. You also don’t want to make it $5,001,000. That’s too easy to meet. It needs to be challenging but attainable. 

Next is how much profit you want to make. This figure is typically a percentage, as commonly seen in corporate guidance (earnings of $10 billion with a profit margin of 18%). If you want to figure out what 12% of $6 million in revenue is, go for it, but I prefer a percentage. 

Finally, determine your top 3-7 business goals. This is a case where less is more. 

Goals are your destination and they should be broad in nature. Goals also need to be SMART: 

• Specific 
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timebound

When Apple launched the iPhone its goal was to capture 1% of the smartphone market by the end of 2008. This is a great example of a SMART goal but let’s break it down so you can see why. Apple wanted 1% of the smartphone market. This is both specific and measurable. It was also was attainable and relevant. The goal is timebound as Apple said it wanted to hit 1% of the market by the end of 2008.   

Obstacles

The next step is to address what obstacles might get in the way of you accomplishing your goals. This is about being honest about with yourself about known challenges. 

It could be your marketing budget rivals who are bigger than you, issues retaining employees or customers, or poor cash flow. 

I guarantee you have at least 2-3 obstacles.

Target Market

Your target market is the people who would be interested in buying what you sell. You might also hear it called target audience.

The answer to “Who is your target market?” is never, “Everybody.” This is a trap. When you try to reach everybody, you will reach nobody. A generic message that is meant for everybody won’t get traction. 

Your target market isn’t limited to age or sex. It could be based on other characteristics as well such as: 

• Demographics: Female business owners or small business owners
• Psychographics/Values: Customers who share your values

When you know who your target market is, it enables you to create content and messaging that resonates.

Differentiators

Differentiators are the things that make your organization distinct from your competitors. Every organization has differentiators. You just have to look closely.

A differentiator could be tied to a product. 

Burger King and Wendy’s are fierce rivals in the same space but Burger King’s burgers are flame-broiled while Wendy’s beef is never frozen. 

A differentiator could be your organization’s culture, the way you get work done, or the type of employees you hire. 

What can trip you up is identifying something that isn’t truly distinct. The number one answer I get is customer service. Stay away from this one. Everybody says they give great customer service, even when they don’t. 

You need to dig deep and be honest about what really sets your business apart.

I guarantee that you have at least one thing that makes you different from your competitors. 

SWOT

A SWOT analysis is a simple yet powerful tool that will help you understand four important aspects pertaining to your business. SWOT stands for:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities 
• Threats

Strengths and weaknesses are internal, meaning they are under your control and easier to address. Opportunities and threats are external factors, meaning you will have limited to no control over them. 

Strengths are the things that your organization does well. It’s what gives you an advantage over your competitors. It could be a product, a CEO, a designer, or a culture.

Weaknesses are those things that prevent the organization from performing at its optimum level. These are the things that need to be improved. Maybe there are issues with your distribution channel. The consequences of not improving weaknesses could be fatal in the long run.

Opportunities offer a set of circumstances that could be favorable for the organization. They are where an organization can do business that will have a positive impact on it.

Threats can cause harm to your organization. It could be a recession, a natural disaster, a pandemic, or a change to an algorithm. They can turn your organization on its head and have the potential to be fatal.

Benchmarks

Benchmarking is non-negotiable. If you don’t know where you are now, you can’t measure your progress or effectiveness going forward.  

While you may have many metrics, you don’t want to benchmark every little thing you do. During the course of the year, you should already be tracking social media posts, blog posts, videos, and ad performance. 

The point of benchmarking as part of your planning is to get an overview of your marketing program. 

I would suggest you benchmark against your key performance indicators (KPI). 

You’re not going to see a section in the template for key performance indicators. I used to include, but it doesn’t really make any sense because I don’t know what you’re measuring or what your KPIs are. 

You should have a spreadsheet or another tool tracks your metrics and your KPIs anyway. 

Make sure to have it available to anybody that takes part in this process and review it prior to moving on to the next section.

Marketing Goals

You created your business goals earlier. Now it’s time to create marketing goals that tie to the business goals.

Remember, goals are the destination. They are broad in nature and they need to be SMART. 

These goals are related to marketing and communication but they are being created to help you reach a business goal. 

Marketing is a business process and I believe that in most cases it should be helping add to the bottom line.

Not every business goal is going to be supported by a marketing goal. If your goal is to build a new factory, marketing will be of no use. If you’re trying to hire for that factory or sell the products made in that factory, then marketing will become extremely useful.

When you’re creating marketing goals, you want to look at the business goals and ask, “Can marketing help me reach any of these business goals?” If the answer is yes, you can move forward and create SMART goals for marketing.

As with your business goals, you don’t go overboard with your goals. Keep them in the 3-7 range.

Marketing Strategy

Goals are where you’re going. Strategy is how you get there.

The marketing landscape has become highly fragmented, with many channels (social media, your website, email, TV, print, radio, banner ads, digital ads, and more) available to you. For this reason, I am a proponent of integrated marketing communication (IMC). It breaks down into four areas: 

• Owned (website, email)
• Social (e.g. Tiktok, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Earned (media relations)
• Paid (ads)

That’s the quick explanation. If you want to go deeper into the Integrated Marketing Communication model, check out this article.

Back to our strategy. The question is, “How are you going to achieve your goals?”

This is where you start thinking about how you’re going to use the different pieces of IMC and the channels within them.

Look at your goals. What can be done in the area of owned media to help you? Earned media? Shared media? Paid media? 

I’m not asking you to be super specific here. You’ll get specific in the tactics. For now, it’s going to be something like: 

• Use shared media to drive leads to our website content by the end of the year
• Use owned media to pull leads through the marketing funnel
• Use paid media to drive leads to a lead magnet
• Use earned media to drive people to the website

Strategy tells you how you’re going to do something in a broader sense. Later, you will flesh this out when you create tactics.

Marketing Objectives

You now have your marketing goals and strategy in place. Let’s create some objectives.

Your goals were broad. Your objectives are more specific. Think of them this way. If you broke down your goal into pieces, those pieces would be the objectives. 

Objectives are the markers that show you where you are at in relation to meeting your goals.

Here’s an example.

The goal is $1 million in revenue. The product you sell costs $500, and it’s only sold on your website, which has a conversion rate of 20%.

How much product do you need to sell? 1 million ÷ 500 = 2000 so, you need 2000 sales/conversions.

How many leads do you need to sell 2000? 2000 sales/conversions ÷ 20% conversion rate = 10,000 leads.

Your objectives are:

• Drive 10,000 leads to the website
• Convert 20% of leads to customers/sales
• 2000 sales/conversions

The objectives are more specific and must be measurable. You don’t get to say, drive leads to the website. You must quantify: How many leads?    

Marketing Tactics

You have been moving down the line from broad to more specific. Now it’s time for tactics.

Most people like to jump straight to tactics because it’s action. However, action before thinking of where you’re going can cause issues.

Your tactics are informed by your strategy and objectives. 

Everything you do needs to have a reason. Connecting your tactics to your objectives makes sure that you aren’t doing things just to be doing things.

Look at your objectives and strategy. Now, how are you going to get to that objective? The tactics are the actions that will help you reach your objectives and goals.

Here is a business example. If an objective is to get 30,000 leads and your strategy is to use shared, paid, and owned media, what actions need to be taken?

I break this down into each area of the IMC model. What are my tactics for owned media? Earned media? Shared media? Paid media?

Your tactics might look something like this: 

• Owned Media: Write 15 blog posts focusing on pain points within your industry 
• Paid Media: Facebook ads that drive people to a sales landing page 
• Social Media: promote blog content on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook
• Earned Media: appear on 10 podcasts that focus on your industry

As you’re creating tactics it’s important to remember you need to measure what you are doing. 

Always test and measure your tactics. Don’t be afraid to drop something that isn’t working. That said, don’t try it for a month and then drop it because it’s not working.

You need to give it time. Don’t start something and kill it three months later. Rand Fishkin, the former CEO of Moz said they produced their White Board Friday for years before it took off and then became the most popular content on the Moz website.

Create your tactics and measure how well they are doing, so can refine your efforts.

Measurement

It’s as important as even to measure your marketing and PR efforts, but it’s challenging. 

Much has changed in the last several years.

There was a time when things such as how many followers you had, how many people liked your post, how many posts you had made to social or your blog, or website traffic were seen as extremely important metrics. 

There have been changes in the environment that have made this type of metrics less relevant.  

The privacy revolution led to regulatory and technical changes that reshaped the data landscape.

iOS privacy features developed by Apple and the continued depreciation of cookies by Google Chrome have severely limited the ability to track individual users across the web. It’s good for users but the granular customer data that we once relied on is now fragmented.

To add to it, the previous generation of Google Analytics was retired in favor of Google Analytics 4. It’s built on an event-based model and uses machine learning and modeling to fill in the data gaps left by user opt-outs and privacy restrictions. 

It’s also important to note that Google Analytics 4 hasn’t been met with rave reviews. Many marketers openly loath the latest rendition, with complaints that its user interface isn’t user-friendly and the tool itself making what used to be simple actions overly complex. 

There are also fundamental challenges to measuring your website’s traffic such as: 

• Zero-Click Searches: Google increasingly resolve user queries with snippets and AI Overviews, meaning questions are answered without people every visiting a website
• Social Media Walled Gardens:  Social media platforms devalue posts that include external links to keep users on their platforms thus severely reducing click-though-referrals (CTR) from social posts and the ability to connect the dots to show attribution
• LLMs as Research Agents: As with Google, large language models (LLM)  such as Gemini and ChatGPT are answering queries without ever sending traffic to your website

First party data, collected directly from your customers via your owned media (email sign-ups, customer accounts, lead forms, and surveys), is your most valuable asset. If you aren’t gathering and leveraging this data, your marketing will suffer. 

Measuring everything you can is still good in principle, but you must privilege metrics that directly link to strategic business results. You need to change your focus from measuring outputs (what you created, outtakes (what people saw) to outcomes (what people did). 

Measurement starts with goals and objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

For every tactic you execute, from a blog post to a video, you need to still track its performance. How many people read the post or saw the video? How many clicked a call-to-action? These outtakes are essential for testing and refinement. 

Instead of just measuring clicks, focus on outcomes that show changes in audience behavior (e.g. increased purchase intent, improved brand trust).

You also need to show value. Did your marketing efforts decrease cost per acquisition (CPA) or increase customer lifetime value (CLV)? 

Today, measurement isn’t just a reporting function. It guides investment, justifies value, and helps improve business growth. 

Dashboard

Measuring is useless without a mechanism to centralize, track, and act on your data. A strategic dashboard, or scorecard, is this mechanism. 

While you should measure everything, it doesn’t all need to be on the scorecard. 

It should only include the most critical metrics – those that directly your progress towards your SMART goals.

The dates should be weekly, biweekly, or monthly depending on your company. 

Generally, smaller companies can manage with monthly updates, while larger companies might find it necessary to update the scorecard on a weekly basis.

The point of the scorecard is that you can see how you are doing and also hold yourself accountable. 

It’s something that should be reviewed in your marketing meetings. 

I did not include a scorecard in the template I’m giving you. The reason why is it could be very different from one organization to the next.

This is something you would want to track in something like a spreadsheet anyway.

Share and Execute

If you have gone through this step-by-step you have a basic strategic marketing plan that will help you hit your business goals.

 But you’re not finished yet.

The biggest mistake is to create a plan and then put it in a drawer.

A plan has zero value until you execute it. 

Share it with your team, commit to quarterly performance reviews, and hold yourself accountable. 

Take the idea off the drawing board and make it real. 

If you have questions, drop them in an email and I will be happy to address them.

Get to planning.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash